Monday, March 21, 2016

A New York story

(originally
published in The Outreach Connection
in February 2003)

Spike Lee
may be one of the five most famous directors in the world, but his fame doesn’t
mean he gets the respect that’s due to him. Actually it limits it. The antics
at Knicks games, the commercials, the inflammatory statements and
rabble-rousing – it’s more the profile of a poseur or provocateur than of a
great artist. Of course, everyone acknowledges Malcolm X and Do the Right
Thing, but after a string of flops we’re almost at the point where Lee
might be widely regarded as someone who occasionally hits greatness despite himself.

Spike Lee

Lately
he’s complained about budget restrictions (his failed ventures include a Jackie
Robinson biopic), while yet becoming more prolific than ever. He has six
directing credits in the last three years: documentaries on Huey Newton and Jim
Brown, the concert film Original Kings of
Comedy, a segment of the anthology film Ten
Minutes Older, and two feature films – Bamboozled
and his new 25th Hour.
Bamboozled was a flop, failing to generate much support even in Lee’s usual
cheering section. I thought it was an utter masterpiece – one of those rare
movies in which artistic risks and happy accidents combine to almost mystical
effect. But most viewers stumbled on the film’s grainy camera style, Damon
Wayans’ accent, and their own assumptions that blackface could no longer serve
as the vehicle for effective satire.

As if in
reaction to these recurring criticisms, 25th
Hour is one of Lee’s most handsome-looking films, with some of his most
straightforward “good” acting. And, through its recurring references to
September 11, it could hardly be more topical. He might be forgiven for
thinking he can’t win, because 25th
Hour has been criticized for opportunism, for grafting its layers of
significance onto a plot that can’t really carry them.

Edward
Norton plays a drug dealer who’s been busted for possession, and the movie
takes place on the day before he turns himself in for a lengthy jail sentence.
He’s basically just a soft kid who fell in with the wrong crowd and the lure of
easy money; the prospect of jail – particularly of assault by the other inmates
– is paralyzing him. On his last day he spends time with his two oldest friends
– one now a schoolteacher (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who’s obsessed with a
teenage pupil (Anna Paquin), the other a Wall Street trader (Barry Pepper);
with his pub owner father (Brian Cox), and with the girlfriend he suspects of
turning him in (Rosario Dawson). And in perhaps the film’s dominant image, he
walks alone with the dog he found dying by the side of the road and then saved
– an act he views as perhaps the one good thing he ever did.

Diverse circle

Lee
paints a diverse circle here – whether measured by racial background or age or
worldview. During his last day of freedom, Norton tests the contours of this
group as if already caged and exploring his boundaries. About halfway through
the movie, he goes to the washroom, and his reflection in the mirror delivers a
long, profane rant (accompanied by a visual montage) against almost every
definable (mainly by race) group in New York. It’s instantly reminiscent of the
similar sequence in Do the Right Thing, but
that echo illustrates what’s different, and unprecedented in Lee’s work, about 25th Hour. There’s no real
anger to the dialogue here – it never seems like more than a rationalization of
Norton’s predicament, an attempt to externalize his self-recrimination. This is
confirmed at the end of the film, when some of the faces in the montage
reappear outside the car as he’s driving away – but now they’re welcome, like
the last thing he has left to grab on to.

It’s as
if Lee was officially giving up the ghost on his angry young black man persona.
Not least of all because the film has less “black” content than any he’s made
before. But the feeling of resignation goes further than that. 25th Hour often feels as
though September 11 had knocked Lee’s stuffing out of him. It’s a distinctly
post-traumatic New York. The opening credits are built around the blue lights
that for a while commemorated the two towers, and one of the film’s key scenes
– a long exchange between Norton’s two best friends – takes place in an
apartment overlooking Ground Zero. Touching on guilt and justice and
recrimination, the conversation grapples with identity and stability, with a
backdrop commemorating our most shocking reminder of those qualities’
fragility.

I
mentioned that some critics find the 9/11 parallels overblown, and point out
that Norton is an implausibly nice drug dealer. The latter opinion surely overlooks
how Lee has always functioned as a satirist (Bamboozled even started out by defining the term “satire”.) His
films have better surfaces than just about anyone else’s, but much as they
radiate intense commitment and vibrancy, he never seems confined by his plots’
ostensible limits. He uses formal distancing devices (one of his favourites
being close-ups with the background shifting behind them – as though the
characters had fallen out of sync with their surroundings), fiery montages,
dialogue delivered direct to camera. He filmed a big chunk of Crooklyn out of focus to reflect the
protagonist’s disorientated state. His films have the feeling of vaudeville, of
agit-prop, of performance art. He wants you to think.

Melancholy mood

But in 25th Hour it all turns
melancholy. I think Lee succeeds in virtually all his ambitions here. The film’s
world is unquestionably stylized; it’s a fascinating aesthetic construction
like all Lee’s films, but it also sustains a remarkably comprehensive study of
attitudes (aided by an excellent cast). And at its heart, it’s as simple as
this: someone led a good life he didn’t deserve and now must pay the price.
What good can that presage for New York? Except that the film’s final passage
explores the possibility that it might still turn out differently, that the
relative lack of accountability might yet be extended, perhaps indefinitely. It’s
a dreamy, elegiac passage, but beautifully rendered, summing up the film’s
equilibrium between resignation and escape.

I should
note though that the ending has been criticized even more than the rest of the
film: the Globe and Mail referred to
a “final 15 minutes that surely ranks among the clumsiest endings an otherwise
good movie has ever received.” I don’t agree (at the very least, “clumsy” seems
unfair to Lee’s fluency), but maybe Lee would take this criticism better than
he’s taken others. Post 9/11, a certain amount of well-meaning clumsiness might
seem to him merely like the mark of a good man.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).